Karma

By Susan Dunlap

Hard-nosed beat cop Jill Smith combs Berkeley for a Buddhist guru-killing cultist
In Berkeley, California, Telegraph Avenue is the headquarters for the city’s strangest inhabitants. Cultists, drug addicts, and hippie burnouts wander its streets, looking to raise their consciousness or, if that fails, to just get high. And Jill Smith walks with them, a beat cop with her finger on the pulse of one of the most unique neighborhoods in America. With time on her hands after her divorce, Jill lets a friend drag her to hear the district’s hot new guru, a Buddhist holy man from Bhutan. As his disciples clap and cheer , Jill tries to keep from smirking. The guru finally draws her attention, however, when he slumps forward with a knife in his back. She calls for backup and cordons off the temple. Jill doesn’t care about karma, but she knows when justice is due.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Susan Dunlap including rare images from the author’s personal collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: May 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9781453250457

Susan Dunlap

Susan Dunlap (b. 1943) is a prolific author of mystery novels. Born in the suburbs of New York, Dunlap majored in English at Bucknell College and earned a masters in teaching from the University of North Carolina. She was a social worker before an Agatha Christie novel inspired her to try her hand writing mysteries. Five attempts and five years later, she published Karma (1981), which began a ten book series about brash Berkeley cop Jill Smith.  Since then, Dunlap has published more than twenty novels and numerous short stories. Her other ongoing characters include the meter-reading detective Vejay Haskell, medical examiner Kiernan O’Shaugnessy, and Zen student turned detective Darcy Loft. In addition to writing, Dunlap has taught yoga, worked as a paralegal, and helped found the women’s mystery organization Sisters In Crime. She lives in San Francisco.

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Reviews for Karma

[jarvenpa · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It's a slight thing, this book. Yeah, I finished it, and yes, I more or less enjoyed it, but it sort of read as a...plot-genie first work. The bones were very evident, somehow. But I have read other Dunlap mysteries and liked them, so possibly it was more my mood than the book. I don't know, there just was a layer of meanness to this mystery.

[siubhank · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Berkeley cop Jill Smith accepts an invitation to see the new guru in town. When the young man dies before her eyes, his followers say it was his karma to die. Jill disagrees as she has found a dagger buried in the young man's heart. Once again, the beleagered Jill Smith fights the odds, including, sometimes, her fellow officers, to find a solution.